Odyssey Question

Taking a cue from Edge magazine, the Israeli magazine Odyssey presents scholars from time to time with a Big Question. I have been asked to give my take on the question Which idea or theory have we abandoned too soon? (April, 2015) My answer was human rationality. Here is my full answer (followed by the original Hebrew version):

Over a hundred years ago, Sigmund Freud wrote about three blows human pride received from Copernicus, Darwin and finally his own work which demonstrated just how little of our mental live we are conscious of. Though contemporary experimental psychology has distanced itself from Freud, the insight that we are not as rational as we would like to believe only became stronger. Moral psychologists, like Jonathan Haidt, show that moral decisions are impacted more by emotions than by rational arguments. They argue that we merely rationalize our emotional responses and that once we realize this tolerance will replace current social tensions. Under the coy heading “nudge”, policy experts, like Cass Sunstein, emphasize that psychological biases can be harnessed to push people into making better decisions, an example being the selling of soft drinks in smaller cups to fight obesity. Even economists notice the gap from the model of perfect rationality and behavioral economics, of the sort championed by Dan Ariely, focuses on phenomena that demonstrate this gap.

The call to give up on rationality is nonetheless premature. The proponents of rationality did not argue that humans are immune to error and bias. Rationality is an ideal, intended to guide action and conversation. For this reason it is also impossible to understand rationality by studying individuals; rationality is social, and it is rationality that makes it possible to combine biases and errors of individuals to produce conclusions that are not erroneous, but are at the same time not final and impervious to further debate. The move from divergent emotional responses to rational discussion is what enables conversation, without which democratic society is impossible. In my view, these distinctions are also critical if we want to understand the evolution of the human mind. Biology should not disregard human rationality.